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Community / Civic Involvement

The Center for Educational Assessment provides technical expertise in areas such as test development, item response theory applications, equating, standard setting, test selection and evaluation, and program evaluation. The Center is a valuable resource for educational policy makers and others who use tests to make important decisions regarding individuals, organizations or institutions.

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Center for Women & Community (CWC) supports and encourages women and is a nationally recognized leader in achieving gender equity. The center offers services to people of all genders throughout the campus and the greater community. These services include information, referral, counseling, training, support groups and education in many areas. Individual counseling, crisis intervention and rape crisis services are offered for Hampshire County, the Five Colleges and UMass Amherst.

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In this service learning course, undergraduates volunteer with 3rd-graders who are participating in Amherst Cinema’s See-Hear-Feel-Film (SHFF) Program. Volunteers watch short animated films with the children, facilitate word games, help them collaboratively create stories, and work with them to create storyboards.

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Middle school students from the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Holyoke, Inc. learn digital circuits and programming concepts from undergraduate electrical engineering majors at UMass Amherst. The program was developed by UMass Amherst's M5, an educational initiative of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The two week summer workshop teaches students electrical engineering skills to create a “beat machine” where they were able to present and keep their final products.

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Citizen Planner Training Collaborative (CPTC) educates local planning and zoning officials to make effective decisions regarding land use. It provides workshops, internet access to core training units, a bylaw collection, many planning related links, training calendars, and e-mail discussion. Also, on-demand training to any community needing to focus on a specific topic, and one-day conferences addressing land use issues on a more in-depth basis. CPTC is an independent collaboration with the support of UMass Extension and the Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.

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The Citizen Scholars Program is a 2-year curricular civic leadership program that partners with community organizations to work toward community goals and help students develop the knowledge, skills, and vision they need to build community, be effective citizens, and advocate for social justice. Students in CSP complete four required service-learning courses taken in sequence over 4 semesters. In the courses, each student articulates his or her vision of how society would be organized if it truly were good, then develops a series of tools to work toward that vision.

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Developing a long term plan for the protection and preservation of Waapaahsiki Siipiiwi Mound was the focus of work conducted by Professor Sonya Atalay with the Sullivan County American Indian Council (SCAIC), of Fairbanks, Indiana. Partnering with the SCAIC and Indiana University to participate with research in the community involving local oral history of Indigenous People, Professor Atalay did a site survey, and mapping, to develop a comprehensive protection and management program for a park with interpretive trails.

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This course is designed for students interested in improving community and individual health by applying the theories and tools from the fields of community organizing and community development. Students gain skills and techniques to involve people in the analysis of the health problems and solutions that affect themselves, their families and their communities. Students are also introduced to the principles and methods of community participatory research in local communities.

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This project aims to identify the needs of minority language children who speak Vietnamese as a home language. We ask (1) What are the first and second language skills of Vietnamese American children living in Springfield? What are their language needs? (2) What school and community programs target Vietnamese American youth? How effective are these programs in promoting language development? Methods include parent surveys, child language screenings, and secondary analysis of state and local education data.

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Twelve schools, colleges and community organizations offer workshops, technology showcases, field trips and contests to help raise awareness of the importance of computer science education during CS Ed Week each December. With support from NSF, CAITE and BPC Alliance, students are exposed to an array of activities that encourage computer science education for students K-12 from the Amherst, Holyoke, Greenfield and West Springfield areas.